RHINO: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (With FREE Bonus Novel OFFSIDE!) by Abbey Foxx Page A

to start trying to like me.”
    “ Fix the engine and I’ll like you even more.”
    “ Do you like the left-hand side of the bed or the right-hand side better? Or are you the kind of girl that starfishes out?”
    “ I like the couch.”
    “ You’re very serious.”
    “ This is a serious matter.”
    Alex looks down at me with smoldering eyes. I never thought blue eyes could smolder, but somehow he manages it.
    “ What else are you scared of, you know, besides storms and football players?”
    “ I’m not scared of you.”
    “ No, you’re scared of you.”
    Alex begins to crawl away, towards the kitchen area I think, or the bedroom, but my hand on his shorts pulls him back towards me. I’m not having him saying that and then thinking he can get away.
    “ How am I scared of me exactly?” I say.
    “ Because you deny yourself what you want in case something bad happens.”
    I laugh. “Come on.”
    “ It’s true. You’re not alone, lots of people are like that. You’d rather not get hurt at all, and miss out on something you’ve always wanted, instead of saying fuck it , even if this goes so wrong I end up in a worse place than I was before, I’ll have at least tried everything I can for my happiness.”
    “ You don’t even know me, what do you think makes you so qualified to say that?”
    “ You’ve been showing me all day.”
    “ I’ve been showing you?”
    “ Those looks, the way you carry yourself, the way your skin bobbles up in goose pimples whenever I’m near you, the way your heart was trembling when you fell onto me.”
    “ That was-.”
    “ Yeah, gravity, I know. Sexy gravity throwing you at me and making your whole body burn with desire.”
    “ I told you already, I’m not going to fuck you.”
    “ Then you’ll never know.”
    There is that moment again, hanging in the air between us, sexual tension thicker than the water below us. I let it hang and he lets it hang and I know he won’t until I do, and then there’s that smile and I have a heat down below rising through my belly right up to my chest and just at the edge of it, he turns again, to break the moment and crawl away from me.
    That asshole.
    “ You want to know why?” I say.
    At the far wall, he turns to lean against it, a meter or two now between us.
    “ Sure.”
    I can’t believe I’m doing this.
    “ Because I loved you, that’s why.”
    Oh dear. This cannot end well. Even Alex doesn’t look like he was expecting that. Well, fuck him. If he’s asked and I’m telling, and he can’t deal with my rampant fucking emotions, my several years of bottled up pain, then screw him. If I have to think I’m going to die, he can cope with me unbottling my shit and pouring it all over him.
    “ I was in love with you, there I said it. I was so fucking in love with you nothing else mattered.”
    “ Wow.”
    “ Yeah, wow. Do you even know how that feels? Do you even know how it feels to want someone so much for such a long time and for that person just to completely ignore you? I was invisible to you.”
    “ I know exactly how that feels”, he says.
    “ Do you? The star quarterback, the first on the invite list to any party. You walk into a room and people stare. I walk in and people look through me with that face that says how the fuck has that door just opened on its own?”
    “ Hey, I was trapped too. I had to be someone I wasn’t, and I wanted you as much as you wanted me.”
    I shake my head. I’m crying now, but so what? Water outside the boat, water underneath it, I might as well make some to go inside as well.
    He doesn’t deserve it, but that’s just me all over, pathetically in love with the wrong man. Even now. Even now as I’m telling him this, I know he’s right. He does turn me on and I do want to fuck him and not just because of missing out the first time around. It’s deeper than that, something that comes from somewhere inside me I can’t do anything to control, as much as I hate to admit it. Alex